Talk:Zyra/@comment-26808509-20171004181653/@comment-26808509-20171006221034
Well to have a vision of her returning to midlane you first have to be clear about what you think Zyra is and what you want from her to be and to do in midlane. For botlane Zyra this becomes pretty easy: she is basicly an anti Carry. With her zoning abilities, her all in potential and damage she can pretty much remove the enemy carry if he isn't peeled enough by his support. Either her zone power does the job by denying farm or her damage in trades. For midlane this becomes a tad more difficult. Her kit and what it does naturally doesn't change, she still has zoning abilites. But her all in becomes a lot weaker due to the loss of the damage from someone else or rather the follow up to her combo. Also in midlane there are a lot of characters who have superior range and the ability to farm safely from the distance. And let's not ignore the fact that is pretty common to bring lots of MR in midlane, either with runes or items, while it's far less likable on botlane. The pure zoning with her abilites and plants alone doesn't work as well in midlane as it does on bot. The length of the lane naturally takes part in this problem aswell. So now is the quesition how to make Zyra more effective in what she does on midlane without buffing her as support and the answer to that is quite easy: The interaction with minions. That's basicly the major difference between support Zyra and midlane Zyra. And the options for that interaction are pretty much countless. Reduced W CD if you kill a given number of minions. Longer plant duration or even refreshed duration if the plant kills a unit. Or plainly bonus damage to minions on one of her spells or even the plants themselves to give Zyra better pushing power. All of these options would work and could turn her into an anti Carry for midlane where she simply zones the enemy midlaner from farming or keeps him midlane so he can't roam. Turning her into a carry herself however is what most people want, i guess. That won't happen unfortunatly, because she would need more effective damage to be one. Not that Zyra isn't dealing significant damage, but most of her damage is pretty unreliable and comes from her plants which attack people you don't even focus. The large damage number at the end of the game is a sum of plant attacks that happend at the side of all action and weren't really noticable. This damage wasn't effective and could have been used somewhere elese onto a high priority target. But because this damage is there nontheless, it's not possible to simply buff Zyra. The potential of her total damage, no matter how unreliable it is, is so huge that she can't be buffed. When RIOT reworked her they went with the motto "quantity over quality" and that's the problem that keeps Zyra from being a real carry and why she is having so shitty scalings.